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How to prepare your garden for summer

Simple tasks you can do this weekend. - by Charlie Albone
  • 27 Jan 2022

It’s the little things that matter, and these simple tasks will prepare your plants for when the heat sets in during the next few months.

WATCH: How to prepare your garden for summer

While you’re enjoying summer outdoors in your garden, things may not be going quite to plan for your plants. They may need a feed, a real drink, a haircut, a new wardrobe or an annual health check-up. These are all things you can do on your way to fire up the barbie by taking a moment to check your plants are relishing the balmy days as much as you are.

Pests and diseases

Holes in the leaves, chew marks and slime trains are all signs of pests making a meal of your plants. While you can apply organic treatments, a little bit of hands-on work often does the trick.

  • Pick caterpillars off plants and feed them to the birds.
  • Tip over upturned pots, buckets or abandoned bricks to pull out snails and drop them in soapy water.
  • Hose off sap-sucking aphids with jets of water.
  • Mildew can be caused by watering late in the afternoon or the evening, so water in the mornings. Also, be sure to water the soil and not the plant.
pests and disease

Slugs and snails feed off the leaves and stems of seedlings.

Withering can mean an infestation of tiny sap suckers.

Withering can mean an infestation of tiny sap suckers.

Feeding

All plants in your summer garden need a feed because they’re at their most productive – and hungry. But not all fertilisers are the same. The common factor is the essential elements – nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) and potassium (K), but it’s the percentages that are different. Lawns want food high in nitrogen because it promotes leaf growth. Phosphorous is for cell regeneration and potassium helps your plants develop flowers and fruit. So choose the fertiliser that meets your plants’ needs. The percentage is listed on your fertiliser bags under the label NPK.

Feeding

Deadheading

Prolong your summer flowering by cutting off any spent blooms, in a process known as deadheading. As their flowers begin to fade, your plants’ energy is focused on producing seeds for survival, however regular deadheading instead channels their energy back into producing more blooms. It’s botanical trickery of the most beautiful and bountiful kind. Meanwhile, in your homegrown vegetable patch, remove produce such as broccoli that’s set to flower – this process is called bolting – and replace it with summer crops such as tomatoes, lettuce and basil.

Deadheading
Cutting flowers for indoors means more outdoors.

Cutting flowers for indoors means more outdoors.

Water repellent soils

Soils can become hydrophobic – or water repellent – when they’re dry for extended periods. They become compacted, air can’t circulate and a waterproof liner settles on the top of the soil. Check for hydrophobia by watering an area of your soil for about 10 minutes. If the water pools rather than sinking, your soil is hydrophobic. In pot plants, the water runs down the side of the pot rather than heading for the roots. Soil-wetting agents – a spray or granules – help your soil restart its water absorption. They’re like a detergent and break down the waxy coating on the soil surface.

Water repellent soils

Mulching

In summer, mulch helps soil retain moisture and keep cool. In winter it helps keep it warm.

  • All year round, organic mulch breaks down and adds nutrients to soil for the roots to devour.
  • With vegie plots or quick-growing annual summer ornamentals, use lucerne, pea straw or sugar cane as they break down quickly.
  • In ornamental gardens where plant growth is slower and flowers, not food, are the aim, use a heavier mulch such as bark that breaks down more slowly
Mulch helps to stop weeds making a home in your garden soil – not all of them, just ones like dandelions that toss their seeds in the air and then need a bare patch to survive.

Mulch helps to stop weeds making a home in your garden soil – not all of them, just ones like dandelions that toss their seeds in the air and then need a bare patch to survive.

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Charlie Albone
Charlie Albone
Charlie has worked internationally and in Australia for the past 17 years, designing and building gardens that are timeless, inspiring and enjoyable to spend time in. In 2015 and 2016, he was awarded two Silver gilt medals for his own gardens at the world’s most prestigious flower show The Chelsea Flower Show.

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